Jeffrey Deitch, center, at the LA MOCA press conference announcing his appointment, with (left to right) museum co-chairs David Johnson and Maria Bell; LA Councilwoman Jan Perry; MOCA’s founding chairman, Eli Broad
LA Times art critic Christopher Knight offers some practical advice for NYC dealer-turned-director Jeffrey Deitch, as he takes the helm at LA MOCA today:
Change the museum’s operating hours and drop the general admission
price, from $10 to zero.
I’m in favor of increasing public access, but I’ve got a more immediately pressing suggestion: Address head-on, with a detailed and satisfying public pronouncement, the serious questions raised by the unorthodox ascension of a commercial dealer to a nonprofit museum’s directorship.
Because of the troubling issues raised by dealer-turned-director, Deitch and MOCA’s trustees had an obligation to be immediately upfront about how those issues would be addressed. Instead, Deitch was introduced at a no-questions “press conference,” followed by piecemeal disclosures of fragmentary information about how he would deal with his art business, his personal collection and his gallery’s large inventory.
His answers have not been reassuring. Soon after his appointment, in response to journalists’ queries, he revealed that he might occasionally sell some works from his considerable private collection, in order to supplement his (undisclosed) museum salary. Almost two months after his appointment was first announced, he informed me that by the time Deitch Projects shut down on May 31, he expected to fold the remaining works from the gallery’s substantial holdings into his private collection, selling off some of that inventory to pay off remaining business-related obligations.
In a nod to museum ethics, Deitch agreed to grant MOCA the right of first refusal on disposals from this inventory-qua-private collection. But that doesn’t cure the problem; it only exacerbates it:
Right-of-first-refusal means that MOCA could potentially buy works from its own director to help defray his expenses connected with his business activities. It would be inappropriate for the trustees to become a party to their director’s commercially-driven transactions.
Deitch also told me that he would sell works from his former inventory at public auction. But while that has the virtue of transparency, it also opens up another can of worms: Those lots would be hammered down bearing the imprimatur of the director of one of the world’s premier contemporary art museums. Again, the museum’s good name would be dragged into a commercial transaction.
It gets worse when one thinks about how such sales would affect the programming and authority of the museum. Any time MOCA exhibits works by an artist in whom Deitch holds a personal financial stake (or even works loaned by collectors to whom he might feel beholden for past dealings), questions of conflict-of-interest will arise. Deitch’s promised disclosure of his holdings to the board of trustees doesn’t solve the problem of public trust. It would be more transparent, but disruptive and unseemly, to indicate on labels which artists on MOCA’s walls are represented in the director’s personal trove. There is no satifying way to handle this problem.
The continued compromising of MOCA’s credibility due to both Deitch’s former commercial activities and his ongoing private-collector status was illustrated by Jori Finkel‘s LA Times recent report on the museum’s upcoming Dennis Hopper retrospective, which was intiated by Deitch and is being curated by artist Julian Schnabel, close friend to the late Hopper.
Finkel felt impelled to raise the conflict-of-interest question:
Soon after Deitch accepted the job at MOCA, art critics flagged
potential conflicts of interest in part because of his personal art
collection. Asked about the artists involved in this show, Deitch said
he did not own any works by Hopper or Schnabel. “I have zero commercial
involvement in this,” he said.
The continuing necessity of dispelling such doubts going forward is one reason why the idea of dealer-to-director almost never flies: The heavy baggage most dealers carry means they probably shouldn’t get on the plane. The improbability of this career path may account for the failure of the Association of Art Museum Directors—through either its written guidelines or professional monitoring—to adequately address the ethical red flags raised by MOCA’s situation. The directors probably never envisioned something like this happening.
AAMD’s code of ethics does say: “A director shall not deal in works of art.” Does a director’s selling works for business purposes from his former gallery’s inventory constitute “dealing”? When I had recently asked AAMD’s professional issues chairman, William Eiland, director of the Georgia Museum of Art, for the association’s definition of “dealing,” he conceded, “That’s something we need to work on.”
The best plan—to me, the only acceptable course—would have been for Deitch to get his own business affairs completely in order before assuming the museum’s directorship, even if that meant postponing his arrival in Los Angeles or hastily completing all his inventory disposals before June 1. If, as he has suggested, he’s apt to have trouble making ends meet on a director’s salary in the future, necessitating further sales of art from his collection, full disclosure is a minimum requirement.
But being upfront about a messy situation doesn’t make it better. It merely acknowledges that it exists. Most of the excitement generated by MOCA’s problematic appointment centered on the brash appeal of the streetwise exhibitions and events at the 14-year-old Deitch Projects. But MOCA has never been lacking in transgressive concepts for exciting, edgy programming, conceived by its savvy curators.
What MOCA desperately needed, after a recent financial meltdown that nearly destroyed it, was a seasoned museum professional at its helm—a director with a proven track record for fiscal responsibility and public accountability, possessing the requisite management skills for working with trustees and a wide-ranging staff.
Deitch, in more ways than one, is a wild card.